Tuesday, February 1, 2011

Enjoyment, burning out.

[I wrote this about a week ago, but for some reason didn't get around to posting it.]

The beginning of January saw me pretty burned out on WoW, having spent the previous month spamming levelling, professions, Heroics, archaeology as well as a healthy dedication to AH shenaningans. It was all terribly efficient, because that's just how I play, but of course that kind of play lead to the stage where I didn't even want to look at another Heroic, Archaeology hit some major DR for the hours spent doing it, and as more people maxed their profession skill the AH markets became increasingly crowded with competition and I suddenly found no motivation to spend any extra time re-undercutting after the third of fourth time I got 90% of my listings back in the mail.

So I stopped playing. Sometimes WoW seems like a very all-or-nothing game, you feel like you play WoW or other games. If you have any min-maxing tendancies you end up acutely conscious of the inefficiency in missing any daily activities, and it can be a hard thing for some people to let go of. I know this feeling well, which is why I promised myself never to "play" the game purely in the name of efficient progression whenever I realise I'm not enjoying it any more.

As a [suspiciously relevant] aside, I would like to highly recommend the downloadable title Super Meat Boy. I didn't much care for it at first, finding the character control too fiddly. But silly me for thinking keyboard controls would suffice -- I plugged in a quality digital gamepad and suddenly that game was like refined platforming gold. It's really hard to accurately describe the fun of that game without making a drug simile. I just makes my brain happy.

Another aside: fucking sigh at nobody else ever tanking. I love tanking, don't get me wrong, but it's frustrating that any time I want to heal, or heaven forbid DPS, I have to wait between ten and thirty minutes just to get into the game. I think we need some kind of weighted system to shorten the DPS queue for the people who have done well more than their share of carrying nubs. The prospect of 30 minute queues for Randoms was a major factor in my decision not to level my Warlock to 85 at this time, and it makes me very sad that my fellow players have created this situation.

But back on topic, almost immediately I can feel WoW sinking its hooks into me again, and suddenly there is no shortage of things I want to do in-game and so little time to do them all... my completionist Engineer finally has a chance to get those once-a-year Lunar Festival rocket schematics; I'm starting to enjoy Heroics on my Warrior again and have my sights set on a second piece of T11; and I got a taste of raiding on my Moonkin last night, which has motivated me to actually get some decent gear on him... which of course means I'll end up tanking a bunch of Heroics because I don't want to wait for the DPS queue.

If there's anything I regret, it's not investigating the Tol Barad craze back at the beginning, or better yet, when win trading was providing ridiculous levels of honour. And those welfare 359 trinkets are very tempting, assuming I don't get bored with the grind before I get them. =)

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About me

My name's Chris and this is my blog. I've decided to stop confining myself to any specific topic. Video games have been fascinating to me for a long time, but we all eventually outgrow our environment.